Goldsmith, both in verse and prose, was one of the most delightful writers in the language. His verse flows like a limpid stream. His ease is quite unconscious. Every thing in him is spontaneous, unstudied, unaffected, yet elegant, harmonious, graceful, nearly faultless. Without the point or refinement of Pope, he has more natural tenderness, a greater suavity of manner, a more genial spirit. Goldsmith never rises into sublimity, and seldom sinks into insipidity, or stumbles upon coarseness. His Traveller contains masterly national sketches. The Deserted Village is sometimes spun out into a mawkish sentimentality; but the characters of the Village Schoolmaster, and the Village Clergyman, redeem a hundred faults. His Retaliation is a poem of exquisite spirit, humour, and freedom of style.
Armstrong‘s Art of Preserving Health displays a fine natural vein of sense and poetry on a most unpromising subject.
Chatterton‘s Remains show great premature power, but are chiefly interesting from his fate. He discovered great boldness of spirit and versatility of talent; yet probably, if he had lived, would not have increased his reputation for genius.
Thomas Warton was a man of taste and genius. His Sonnets I cannot help preferring to any in the language.
Cowper is the last of the English poets in the first division of this collection, but though last, not least. He is, after Thomson, the best of our descriptive poets—more minute and graphical, but with less warmth of feeling and natural enthusiasm than the author of The Seasons. He has also fine manly sense, a pensive and interesting turn of thought, tenderness occasionally running into the most touching pathos, and a patriotic or religious zeal mounting almost into sublimity. He had great simplicity with terseness of style: his versification is neither strikingly faulty nor excellent. His occasional copies of verses have great elegance; and his John Gilpin is one of the most humorous pieces in the language.
Burns concludes the series of the Illustrious Dead; and one might be tempted to write an elegy rather than a criticism on him. In naïveté, in spirit, in characteristic humour, in vivid description of natural objects and of the natural feelings of the heart, he has left behind him no superior.
Of the living poets I wish to speak freely, but candidly.
Rogers is an elegant and highly polished writer, but without much originality or power. He seems to have paid the chief attention to his style—Materiam superabat opus. He writes, however, with an admiration of the muse, and with an interest in humanity.
Campbell has equal elegance, equal elaborateness, with more power and scope both of thought and fancy. His Pleasures of Hope is too artificial and antithetical; but his Gertrude of Wyoming strikes at the heart of nature, and has passages of extreme interest, with an air of tenderness and sweetness over the whole, like the breath of flowers. Some of his shorter effusions have great force and animation, and a patriotic fire.
Bloomfield‘s excellence is confined to a minute and often interesting description of individual objects in nature, in which he is surpassed perhaps by no one.